Crystal Kit Documentation

Please watch the tutorial.

It shows you how to add the Crystal Kit to your scenes, explains the properties and gives some rendering tips.
You can skip through the chapters if you need only specific information.

Rendering the Crystals

Please make double sure that in your senes the volume bounces are set to at least 3.
Render Properties > Light Paths > Max Bounces, see image.
Volume rendering is essential part of the translucent crystals types, without this the look would change.

Also increase Transmission Bounces if you see overly dark areas in the crystals that should be illuminated by light shining through.

Please note that since the materials are refractive and have a volume component they will take a bit longer to render.
For still frames this won't be an issue at all, just activate denoising.

If you want to decrease rendertimes and can life with the look change then just deactivate volume rendering and dispersion. This will make everything render around 25% quicker.

For sequences you might hit high rendertimes if you want them noise free with Cycles only. For those cases I recommend you an external temporal denoiser like
Neat Video, DaVinci Resolve or any thing else that can handle a sequence grain. Just remember to deactivate the Blender denoise if you want to denoise it later on.

Applying the modifier

If you want the result as real geometry, not as instances in a modifier then please open up a new geometry nodes window. Select the Crystal Kit Nodes and find the orange frame at the end of the tree. Enable the "Realize Instances" Node in it via "Toggle Node Mute" = M. Now you can appy the modifier as usual. Please note that having realized instances live while working with the modifier will decrease performance, only use this if you want to apply everything, should you need this.

Using the Crystal Kit Geo Nodes

1. The Crystal Kit needs Blender 3.5 or higher to function

2. Download and unarchive the “CrystalKit_AssetKit_BLENDER.zip” to a path of your choice.

3. Make sure you don’t change the contents or the hierarchy of this folder

4. Use the included “CrystalKit_AK.blend” directly, or

5. Append the Collection “AK_CrystalKit_GeoNodes” into your scenes
   File > Append > Open “CrystalKit_AK.blend” > Collections > Append  “AK_CrystalKit_GeoNodes”, Collection does not need to be visible or renderable

6. Select a geometry you want to grow crystals on

7. Add a new Geometry nodes Modifier and select the node group “AK_CrystalKit_GeoNodes”

8. Use the Geometry Nodes properties to edit your crystals. All Properties have descriptions if you hover over them.

9. Watch the Tutorial for further input